New Whales

 My whale nerdom has intensified over the years, and now with the new boat, the opportunities have increased to venture out and look for them.  This year has introduced us to some new whales as well as visiting with some that we have known for years.

We named this whale Anan because we encountered it near Anan Creek on our way to spend the day at the Anan Wildlife Observatory.  There were 2 large whales and one smaller whale travelling together but this was the only good tail shot I got.  The smaller whale did a lot of breaching and seemed to be having a good time and enjoying life and the sunny day.

We later saw Anan with maybe the same two whales in September quite a long way from where we first saw them in July.

The top photo is of a new whale to us named Falco.  The whale Falco was with is a whale already known to us named Frisbee.

This is Ghost.  Ghost is maybe my favorite of "our" whales and is one of the first that I photographed and documented.  Ghost is very photogenic and always dives with tail high in the air giving lots of opportunities for pictures.  

Another already known whale named Halo that we recently saw with Ghost.

One more already known whale named Chuck that we also recently saw with Ghost, Halo, Frisbee, and a whale that I thought was new for us but upon investigating some old photos, we first saw in 2019.  That whale wasn't named yet so we named it Kash.

This is Kash.  Looking through some old photos, I realized that I had pictures of this whale from August of 2019 in a group of whales consisting of Ghost, Chuck, Razorback, and Stihl.  I find it very interesting that many of these whales are feeding and travelling together year after year.  I'd love to know why.  Are they related?  Friends?  Coincidence?  Another interesting fact is that most of the whales we see here around Wrangell and Southeast Alaska in general spend their winters in Hawaii particularly off of the west coast of Maui near Lahaina in the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary.  Summers in Southeast Alaska and winters in Hawaii sounds like an idyllic existence in my modern human mind although the whales have many dangers, obstacles, and effort to navigate for that lifestyle.  Many years ago now, one of our local shrimp fishermen lost several of his shrimp pots while they were set out to catch shrimp.  He had no idea what had happened to them and as losing gear is sometimes a result of commercial fishing, he just continued on with his season.  Several months later he was contacted by people in Hawaii who had disentangled a humpback from his missing shrimp gear!!  The whale had swam all the way from the Wrangell, Alaska vicinity to Hawaii while dragging the buoys, lines, and pots!  Fortunately, there are many whale lovers like myself who have been trained and volunteer to disentangle whales when they are found in need of assistance and there is a large community of whale disentanglers in Hawaii as well as a smaller group here in SE AK.  I travelled to Sitka, AK a few years ago to be trained in the techniques and strategies for whale disentanglement but fortunately have not had a chance to help.

This was a brand new whale for us and another photogenic one.  We named it Snow.

These aren't new whales but since I mentioned them in this post I figured I would include their pictures.  The top whale is Razorback and the bottom is Stihl.

How about some whale talk?  My inexpensive hydrophone and even more inexpensive speaker for it sure make a whale encounter even more incredible.

This next video is from this past April, according to the time stamp (I thought it was last winter), and is a short one that has two of my favorite sounds:  the breathing of a whale and Andrea's laugh.  This was a small humpback that was hanging out near town for several days and took advantage of the natural fish corral that the harbor makes to get a few meals of fish schooled up there.  Just two days ago I saw a small humpback very near to town for most of the day.  Maybe it is the same one?  I don't have photos of it and have not seen its tail yet but hope to soon.

The humpbacks are typically in our area well into November and even December before they begin the journey to Hawaii so I hope to have more encounters before 2021 ends!

Time Speeds Up

 

Looks like it has been literally almost one year since I last posted anything here, my how time seems to pick up speed the older you get!  For the few of you who read this and enjoy it, my apologies.  As Autumn loses its struggle to keep Winter at bay, I'll be more disciplined in putting some new stories here.

It was a decent summer this year of 2021, much, much, much, much better than the misery that was 2020.  2021 was also a year in which I was fortunate enough to find a very nice boat for sale at a price that I could manage which made it possible to get out and better enjoy the seas around me.  We photographed and named some new whales for us so I'll do a post about them and we ventured north in the boat to a new place for us that had the highlight of Andrea successfully fighting and landing a halibut that measured 75 and a half inches long and weighed somewhere around 225 - 230 pounds!

But, I'll start the first post of 2021 with an encounter we had just 3 days ago on one of the first sunny calm days we have had in nearly a month.  

Andrea and I, as well as Kash, her 10 month old Siberian Husky, went out boating with no real plan other than to enjoy the Sun, take some photos, drink some wine, and hope to see something cool in the way of wildlife or nature.  We decided to go between Wrangell Island and the mainland which isn't usually our preferred destination but we hadn't been that way in a while and I have a tree job to do there soon at a remote cabin so going that way would also give me the chance to see what that job will involve.

Here are a few pictures of the upcoming job.  We have to take out the tall Sitka Spruce  tree to the right of the cabin in these pictures.  The tree is big and leans out over the cabin a bit so we will have to climb it and take it apart in pieces.  This means climbing to close to the top, tying a climbing rope (line) and a lowering line to the tree, rappelling back down and then working my way back up cutting off the branches along the way.  Some of the branches will probably have to be lowered on the lowering line so they don't fall on the cabin and damage the roof or break windows.  Once the branches are all removed and I'm back at the top, the top of the tree will be cut off, topping the tree, and then I'll start working my way back down cutting pieces of the trunk of the tree off as I go.  Yes, it is scary sometimes, but with experience, skill, and extreme focus, it is done safely.

The route we took in the boat after visiting this cabin took us passed a small river called Aaron's Creek which is one of my favorite places in the area.  It is rugged, remote and about as untrammeled by humans as it gets.  It also has some amazing and unnamed mountains lining its valley.

If a person were to climb these mountains it would involve a very long day of extreme bushwacking through an area known for very large brown bears just to get to the base of one of them.  A helicopter would bypass all of that but in my thinking would be cheating.

I won't drag this first post out for too long so I'll get to the highlight of the day.  After nearly circumnavigating Wrangell Island without seeing anything too exciting, I decided to head away from Wrangell to a strait where whales are more likely to be.  When we rounded the point into Chichagof Pass, we immediately saw what looked like a whale spout in the near distance glistening in the sun.

We quickly realized the spouts were not big enough or tall enough to be from Humpbacks so we began to get excited that maybe, just maybe we had found some orcas.  As the unmistakable sight of a black dorsal fin rising out of the water came into view, we knew we were in luck!!  We soon counted 5 orcas travelling in a loosely organized pod that consisted of 3 females and 2 smaller young orcas.  I positioned the boat ahead of them so we could wait for them to pass by and hope that they would pass by close enough to get some good photos.  I have heard or read somewhere that splashing your hand in the water can get orcas to come closer and I had an orca encounter before in which I did that and think that maybe the splashing did work so I did it again.  A few minutes later, one of the orcas swam belly up right under the boat!!  The two young orcas seemed particularly energetic and kept slapping their tails on the water's surface and even breached a couple of times.

I didn't get many good pictures, orcas are harder to photograph than humpbacks (for me anyway) but I did get a slightly blurry photo of a marking on one of them that was good enough quality to use as an identifying mark.  Like the tails of humpback whales, orcas have unique markings near the base of their dorsal fins and on the gray saddle behind the dorsal fin.  This is how individuals are recognized by humans.  I have another photo of an orca from several years ago that has a white mark at the base of its dorsal fin that looks a lot like the shape of the state of West Virginia.

This orca was matched in the database that I submit my photos to and has been named Peaches by the person who has a previous sighting, an unfortunate name for such an incredible creature  I think we will call her Firefly because the mark reminds me of the ship from the sci-fi show of the same name. This identification also made it possible for me to find out that these are what are known as transient orcas.  I won't get into the details of what transient orcas are but it basically means they travel over big areas and are eaters of marine mammals like seals and sea lions not fish.  Transient orcas are also known as Biggs orcas after a biologist who was a pioneer of orca research (and because it seems like humans have to stick the name of someone who supposedly "discovered" something in nature that has existed and been known about by some for centuries).  We stayed with this group for about an hour enjoying their communications, the young ones energy, and just being in their presence before they swam out into more open water where it would be hard to anticipate where they would go making it hard to keep up with them in the boat.

That's enough mediocre photos.  On to the really cool stuff!

I keep an inexpensive hydrophone and even more inexpensive speaker in the boat for encounters just like this.  It makes a magical experience even more so.

In that video, I am fairly certain that the orca was right under the boat making those sounds because the hydrophone got pulled enough to knock over the speaker.

If you enjoyed those videos, go back to June 2019 in this blog and find the post titled Whale Language.  There are more recordings with the hydrophone from a different orca encounter while kayaking not far from where this one happened.

Peace

It seems that my post back in August in which I described a chance encounter with a man who fled communism in Czechoslovakia led at least one reader to make some leaps in logic as to who I am as a person.  That is okay, it definitely is not the first time that I have had that experience.  I realize that we are living in an increasingly polarized nation and that leaps in logic have become commonplace.

I will do my best to leave this blog one in which I only post themes and photos of the natural world in Alaska and wherever else I may be.  I rarely in past posts have provided my insights, opinions, experiences, or thoughts on subjects like politics, religion, or any other social or cultural phenomena but it seems it doesn't take much in this day to make assumptions about a person.

So, in respect for the few readers of this blog that I have, no more of my views on anything that will trigger anyone.  I am starting another blog in which I will solely write essays about various thoughts and subjects, some controversial, some not.  I will also write posts about interesting books I may be reading to share some of those subjects.  I encourage and invite discussion or comments on the posts and am very interested in hearing the thoughts and ideas of others so don't hesitate to reply.  I will be writing essays about subjects and ideas like the God Shaped Hole, the Stoned Ape Theory, alien technology, human history, religion, politics, culture, as many "controversial" topics that I can come up with..  

If any readers of this blog are interested in the new blog, please let me know in some way.  I will only give the title and address of it to those who ask so to avoid hurting anyone's feelings, making people angry, or making people make leaps of logic.  

Love to all

(As a postscript, this blog may not have many posts in the near future as I might be without a camera for a while.  I'm not sure yet but my camera might be inoperable after spending a few minutes submerged at the bottom of a swamped canoe after a recent encounter with a brown bear.  If my camera is dead, I may post some older photos and tell some older stories and also use my phone to take some pictures as well.  No humans or bears were harmed in the encounter but it had serious potential to have been much worse.  I love living in a place with animals that can kill you and eat you!  Makes being in the wild wild!)

Mushrooms, again

 My fascination with mushrooms only continues to get stronger and deeper from year to year as I learn more about them and spend more time out in nature looking for them.  They are luring me in to some kind of philosophical and religious contemplation that I would have never imagined these commonly overlooked and unappreciated creatures would have the power to do.  I'm not even talking about "magic" mushrooms although I have had a great deal of experience with those gifts in my younger life and plan to rediscover them again soon now in the middle part of my life.  

The more I learn about mushrooms, the more I have come to think of them as somewhat sentient.  At least sentient by my human definition of that word.  The mushroom itself is only a small but visibly noticeable portion of the overall organism, it is the "fruit" similar to how an apple is only a small part of the overall apple tree.  The "tree" portion of the mushroom lies underground and covers large areas of a forest.  The "tree" part of the mushroom is called the mycelium which branches and weaves itself among the roots of the above ground plants and in many cases, has a symbiotic relationship with these neighbors.  The mycelium is connected to the forest in a way that makes me think of the internet because of all the information it receives through this nervous system like network.  When I see mushrooms now, I see them almost as if they are a sentient and knowing being, similar to when I see an animal in the forest. 

There is a very significant amount of anecdotal and scientific evidence to show that the relationship between humans and mushroom has existed for millennia and that these humble organisms have had some very profound and significant effects on us and very possibly helped us become the advanced hominids that we are.  I have mentioned the Stoned Ape Theory in past posts in which I explained that this unfortunately named theory explores the possibility that our hominid ancestors consumed mushrooms with mind expanding properties while they foraged for food.  Mind expanding mushrooms like the Psiloybes have been scientifically shown to increase the neural connections in our brains so this theory has some true potential to have at least some truth to it.  

There is also an increasingly hard to deny amount of evidence that psychoactive mushrooms and other plants have had a significant role throughout the more recent history of humans.  I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of a new book titled The Immortality Key which was researched for over 12 years by the author in which he provides archaeological, botanical, and historical evidence of how these plants and fungi, ergot in particular, have shaped our belief systems and cultures for millenia.

This is one of the most delicious of edible mushrooms, the King Bolete.  I realize there is nothing in this picture to give a sense of scale but these mushrooms can easily get to a foot tall and the cap can be nearly a foot in diameter,  These are hefty, solid mushrooms that can provide several meals/  /They have a somewhat nutty flavor and make me feel like  I am ingesting the essence of the earth when I am lucky enough to find them before the insects find them.  Being a day too late can be enough for these treasures to have begun to become inedible.  

These mushrooms in the above picture are called Shaggy Manes and they are an easily identified edible mushroom often pickled.  As you can see, they grow in areas that aren't necessarily the most pristine.  This particular group was growing right next to the sidewalk near the chiropractor's office in "downtown" Wrangell.  The hydrostatic pressure of these mushrooms gives them the strength to literally grow up through concrete pushing it aside or upwards as they grow.  

Although this looks like a tasty dessert morsel dropped on the forest floor, it is actually a really interesting mushroom called Strawberries and Cream.

I have written about these well known and photogenic mushrooms a lot in the past but there are so many interesting things about them and they are so prolific and pretty that they don't get tiresome to me.  This is Amanita muscara, a mushroom known to and used by humans of the northern latitudes for centuries.  They are commonly found throughout folklore and art and even in more contemporary popular culture like the cartoon The Smurfs.  There is a reason for this - not only are they striking in appearance, they have had significant influence on our society in ways you would never guess.  These are psychoactive mushrooms meaning consuming them will make you able to perceive aspects of our world that our daily minds typically do not and have been used by peoples from Siberia to Scandinavia before Christianity moved us away from many of the spiritual aspects of nature.  I have yet to try these as my reading has said that they are more effective after having been consumed by another person.  Shamans would eat these mushrooms in order to absorb and detoxify some of the more unpleasant effects and then the urine of the shaman would be drunk in order to obtain the psychoactive and spiritual effects.  The reason for this is that the principle psychoactive chemical is ibotenic acid which is converted to muscimol in the human body.  Muscimol is a more powerful chemical that is excreted from the body in urine.  Sounds gross to us now I know but it is incredibly interesting to me.

This mushroom is also very possibly connected to the origin of the Santa Claus myth.  It's red and white coloration is an obvious similarity as its home in northern latitudes but there is more.  Caribou and reindeer, both found in latitudes with Amanita muscara, love these mushrooms and the idea of Santa's flying reindeer could be more of a figurative form of flying than actual aviation.  The "flying" is possibly the trip the mushrooms give.  These mushrooms are also found under coniferous trees like spruce and pine which present an image of gifts under a Christmas tree.  It is very possible that many of our Christmas traditions are tied to this beautiful mushroom.  As Christianity spread throughout the pagan world, it did its best to find a way to tie in some of the pagan beliefs with Christian ideology to make conversion more tempting and acceptable or because some of the pagan beliefs were too true to deny.  Easter and Christmas are awfully close to the winter solstice and the spring equinox which could be coincidental or very intentional.  

This was a new one for me that we found while taking a walk in the Muskeg Meadows Nature Preserve.  This is called Purple Fairy Club and is a type of coral mushroom.  Avid birders keep track of their bird sightings on what is called a lifelist, I feel like I am doing the same with mushrooms.  When I find a new mushroom, I get excited even if I don't know exactly what the mushroom is.

No idea what these orange mushrooms are but they are growing in a few spots by the hundreds!

These are Shaggy Manes again with the top photos being nice new ones still ready to be eaten while the bottom photo is an example of what Shaggy Manes look like as the rapidly age,  They basically dissolve into an inky black liquid which is an interesting trait of these guys,

I hope that my mushroom obsession may spark some interest in whoever reads this and that the next time you see one growing somewhere that you think a little differently of them.  Maybe you will see it as something much different and more mysterious and amazing than before or even as a possibly sentient being that may be seeing you as well  like the above mushroom that Andrea found looking at her as she sat in one of our secret spots!  

2+2=5

 I had an impromptu and long conversation yesterday near the ice cream section of one of our local grocery stores with a long time Wrangell resident named Ivan.  I have known of Ivan for over 20 years now at least in a general way/  He was probably Wrangell's original semi-professional photographer back before digital cameras made photography so much more accessible and easy for the amateur.  Ivan produced photos with film cameras and still has postcards and prints available for sale in town and has photo credits in many books about the Wrangell area.

Other than his photography, the only other things I knew about him were that he fled his home nation of Czechoslovakia sometime decades ago literally ahead of Soviet bullets and that he worked at the lumber mill in Wrangell back in the timber heyday as a saw sharpener.  That was about it, I knew him well enough to say hello on the occasions that we encountered each other.  He is in his late 70s as is his wife and they both still speak in strongly accented English.

My conversation with Ivan started when I saw him in the grocery store and told him that I enjoyed some of the memes he sends out to a contact list by email.  One of our mutual friends forwards them to me.  These memes are typically politically oriented and are conservative.  Ivan is usually wearing a Trump hat when I see him in town and on this day was wearing a camoflauge Trump 2020 hat.  Regardless of what anyone thinks of the President or someone who supports him, I admire and worry a little about elderly people who are brave enough to openly express their favorable opinions about this President.  Unfortunately, we are living in a time in which opponents to people like Ivan are becoming increasingly violent and unafraid to assault anyone expressing an opinion they don't like.  Ivan himself experienced this a couple years ago in the other grocery store when a person he considered a friend from their years as coworkers at the mill approached him while he was wearing a Make America Great Again hat and told him that if he ever saw him wearing that hat again he would punch him in the face and take it off of his head.  The person making this threat is about 20 years younger and much larger than Ivan.  

Anyway, my expression of agreement with some of his emails led to our nearly 45 minute conversation there in the frozen food section of the store.  Ivan is from Prague which is now part of the Czech Republic but at the time he lived there was Czechoslovakia.  Ivan experienced the gradual conversion of his country to communism.  He described the political machinations that led to the complete takeover of the Czech government in gradual incremental steps until a final political maneuver resulted in a completely communist government, a Communist Paradise as he said the Party described it in their propaganda.  Ivan described the typical situations we are familiar with: the constant shortages of food and other necessities, the lines for what commodities were available, the secret police, the looming and domineering paranoia of neighbors, friends and even family members.  He described the health care system which did provide free health care for everyone but required the bribing of bureaucrats to get any kind of real aid.

Ivan didn't like this life and wanted to be free and became interested in America.  He wanted to learn English but the only English that the party would allow the citizens to experience was one American newsletter published by the American Communist Party called The Worker.  Ivan learned how to read and write English but could not speak it as he had no one to speak it with.  Eventually he reached out to the publishers of The Worker to find Americans with whom he could correspond.  These "pen pals" helped him learn more about what America was truly like which was much much different than what his country's communist party told them.  In one correspondence someone sent him something critical of the Soviet leader-Khrushchev   This worried him as he didn't know if the secret police were setting him up or if it was really from someone in America.  Did he keep it? Destroy it?  Or turn it in to the police?  He turned it in to the police who made it seem like no big deal and seemed to be forgotten about until several days later when the secret police came to his house, arrested him and took him to their station.  They wanted him to become an informer for them, an informer on his neighbors and friends.  He did not but knew that this made him a person forever under suspicion.  Ivan said teachers encouraged students to report on their parents so as a child in school he was told by his parents to never talk about anything that happened in their home while he was at school.
Ivan and his wife fled Czechoslovakia in 1968 when he was 24 when the Soviets invaded the country to crush an increasingly popular movement towards democracy.  Ivan was nearly run over by a Soviet tank and had rounds from AK 47s zip past him as they fled.  They were able to board a train intended for foreign tourists to get out of the country and made it to neighboring Austria and from there to the U.S.

Ivan is worried for our country now.  He said he feels like his life has gone in  a circle and he is reliving his younger life as he sees the same things happening here that happened in his home nation.  The media manipulation and propaganda, the violent Democrat supported thugs in the form of Antifa and BLM, the increasing censorship, the increasing suppression of other opinions, the attempts to meddle in elections, these are all things he has literally lived through once.  He appreciates what we have here in this nation far more than far too many who were born and raised here.   He doesn't take for granted what we truly have here and what we stand for, he knows that if our country were to fall to these thinly veiled communist policies and proposals that the rest of the world will follow.  He is afraid that too few of us will realize what is really happening here before it is too late and we all wake up one day to realize that we now live in an authoritarian regime.  He is a man who fled to America to escape communism who is now afraid that America is falling to communism.  These are the reasons why he supports the President.

It is why I do as well.  

My Life's Philosophy

as stated so simply and beautifully and concisely by a white rapper:


"I don't care if you are black or white or gay or straight or old or young or smart or dumb or where you're from or what you make the only thing I care about is living like I'm not afraid of dying while I'm sleeping so I seize it while I'm still awake."

The Kashevarof Islands

This post is about two island groups that lie to the east of Prince of Wales Island a little more than an hour by boat from Wrangell, the Kashevarof and the Blashke Islands.  This area is far from the silt laden waters around Wrangell where the Stikine River empties into the sea and clouds the water for many miles with the massive amount of glacial silt the river has picked up over its 300 mile length.  These waters of the Stikine River affect the sea life in the Wrangell vicinity as the silt and the millions of gallons of freshwater dispersing into the saltwater limit what ocean creatures can survive here near Wrangell.  The subject area of this post is unaffected by Stikine waters making it more typical of what a person thinks when they think of the ocean - jellyfish, anemones, whales, sea birds, kelp beds, and all mysterious denizens of the deeps.

This is a nautical chart view of the subject islands of this post.  Nautical charts are an artform in themselves in my opinion and provide a lot of information about the waters of an area.  An eye trained to read and recognize the features a chart reveals would see that there are many narrow passages, reefs, rocks, shallow waters and other navigational hazards in these two groups of islands making them a perfect place to explore by paddle craft.  When I did whale watching tours, I did spend many hours poking around this area as there are always whales here but it was somewhat nerve wracking and limiting by in a large boat with an easily damaged propeller.  I have wanted to explore this area by kayak for several years now and am very happy to have finally done it although the 5 nights that we spent here went by much too quickly and my mind is still there wishing the rest of me was there as well.  Being a "responsible adult" isn't my favorite thing.

This is a view that I haven't had enough of in my life in the last few years.  It has been too long since I have done a multiple night kayak trip.  I was admittedly a little rusty in the packing strategy for a long kayak trip and sitting in a kayak for long periods of time requires some getting used to but thankfully, the weather did its part to make our trip pleasant as we blew the dust off of our kayaking skills.  I was also learning how to use a recently purchased wide angle fish eye lens which allowed for this photo.

This is Andrea early in the trip doing her Orca summons to let the orcas know that we were in the area and that they should come by sometime while we were there.  It might seem a little silly or hippy dippy but I have personally seen this work which resulted in the Whale Language post I did in June of 2019.   I have read accounts from Orca researchers who have admitted that they have sometimes felt that there was some sort of telepathic communication between them and the orcas in the sense that the orcas seemed to know what they were thinking.  I have had 3 experiences in my life that make me tend to think there may be some truth to this although admittedly, coincidence could also explain these experiences.  Whether telepathy, coincidence, or divine intervention, those experiences were outstanding ones in my memory that struck me as significant.

This area has a relatively commonly seen pod of orcas as well as lots of kelp beds, sea otters, seals, whales, and excellent beach combing beaches providing lots of opportunities for discovery and awe.  I went into this trip expecting (or hoping for) some amazing whale encounters envisioning photos of breaching behemoths and new flukes to add to the library of whales we have identified in the area but the trip ended up being one more of interesting geology, flowers, and one awesome bird nerd experience.  There were whales, many whales, but we had no whale encounters that stood out as exceptional to our high standards.

Oh well, beautiful scenery, isolation, and the freedom of wild shores would just have to suffice!

It has been a rather cold and rainy summer so far this 2020, just another thing that has made this year one that I am looking forward to ending, but we got lucky and had a nice week of weather for this trip.  It wasn't always sunny, most days had a mixture of sun and clouds, but the only rain we experienced was on our last afternoon and evening when we were comfortably sitting in camp chairs on the beach under a tarp anyway.

This isn't an edited photo ( I do very little editing and have yet to try advanced editing programs like Lightroom), Andrea was really glowing when I looked over at her as we were taking photos of some Common Loons nearby on the water.  It was raining in the distance but sunny where we were creating this cool contrast.

Weaving our way through some labyrinthine passages that allow a shortcut through the Blashkes.

These islands lie at the furthest end of a large body of water that reaches all the way down to Ketchikan and the outside ocean called Clarence Strait.  This strait can be a beautiful, placid mirror or a terrifying maelstrom of angry dark water and all variations in between.  Winter storms here can produce winds over 100 mph and seas of 20 feet.  Many years ago, while being shuttled from Wrangell to the NE side of Prince of Wales Island (POW) for a late fall deer hunting trip with some friends, I experienced one of these storms.  It is a boating experience that I will never forget - blowing sideways snow mixed with wind whipped sea spray, a sea of white caps and green water, wave troughs deep enough to be unable to see over when the boat was in them, it was intense.

Our sea conditions were much gentler with only a few hours of stiff breezes and mild chop on the water to deal with, otherwise it was smooth paddling.  This area of winter storms results in some excellent opportunities for beach combing as well as some significant barriers of battered logs blocking access to the forest where the trees and beach meet.  We did find some wilderness treasures in the form of cool rocks, interesting sea life, and a perfectly good inflatable buoy.  Unfortunately, plastic detritus is very common on any wild shoreline so we found a lot of that as well but not enough to ruin our sense of solitude and wildness.

Some examples of the weather beaten, storm lashed beaches in this area.  Some of the most windward facing beaches have a significant barricade of battered logs that can reach all the way up into the forest.  Any recognizable characteristics identifying the original tree species of these logs has long since been beaten, worn, sandblasted, and rubbed away leaving the limbless, rounded, and bleached remnants here on these remote beaches.  These trees could have come from anywhere in the world and could contain exotic species from far off lands.  When I was in Kodiak earlier this year, I found a western red cedar log on a beach there, the nearest red cedar growing in a forest to Kodiak is found a very short distance north of Wrangell.  Wrangell is about 20 miles south of the farthest northern limit of western red cedars.  While the island of Kodiak really isn't much farther north in latitude than Wrangell, it is on the other side of the Gulf of Alaska a couple thousand miles away.

A pretty rock

The pretty lavender colored inside of a dead and broken urchin.

The thing in the above two pictures is a mermaid's purse, probably a term that the most "woke" social justice feminists among us would protest and find offensive, after all, can't a merman also have a purse?  Sorry, back to reality - a mermaid's purse is actually an egg case for a variety of sharks, stingrays, and skates.  It is a tough leathery case that protects the developing animal until it is ready to hatch and swim away into the vast ocean.  I don't know what species this one came from but I'm going to assume it was some sort of skate since they are common here.  The water bottle it is next to is a one liter bottle so the purse itself is about 6 inches long.

These were some sort of very pretty shellfish washed up on a beach attached to a very small log.  I didn't know what these were exactly when I found them,  but have been informed by my friend Ceona that they are goose barnacles.  Thanks for the knowledge Ceona!

When I first caught sight of this rock on the beach, I thought I had found some human created sculpture of a skull, maybe some ancient Aztec death god washed up on a remote Alaska beach.  On closer inspection, it was an even more interesting sculpture sculpted by time, water, and sand into something that to my biased human perspective looks like a figurine of a human skull.  How this stone came to look this way is incomprehensible to me.  I can ponder on the natural processes of erosion, the softness of the stone, the weathering processes and all the other factors that resulted in this particular image and still be awed by the natural world and all of the aspects of it that remain mysterious and unknown.

At this time of year, another common sight on the beaches are wildflowers, in some places lots of wildflowers.

Red Paintbrush.

A member of the mint family, Self Heal.

Red Columbine in the midst of a jumble of driftwood.

Harebells

A type of orchid called Coralroot that grows in the forest under trees with open understory.


I think I mentioned earlier in this post that we did not have too many outstanding wildlife encounters on this trip although the whales and sea otters were abundant and seen many times each day.  There are deer on these islands and I will assume there are some black bears but we saw neither.  An odd feature of these islands is that there are no squirrels so the absence of their chattering was noticeable at times.

This was the best I could do as far as sea otter photos.  It was difficult to get close enough to them with my limited lens capabilities and photography from a bobbing kayak presents some challenges as well.  These guys were all over the place, some had pups on their chests as they floated by, others were occasionally whacking on some sort of shellfish with a rock, all of them looked rather relaxed in these protected waters in their kelp forests.  I spent some time one evening contemplating sea otters as they relate to evolution and creationism.  Yep, that is my brain.  As I will assume everyone knows, sea otter fur has been highly prized and has been very valuable for centuries which at one time led to the near extermination of the species as fur traders, in this area, Russian fur traders, hunted them voraciously.  Sea otter fur is so valuable because of its exquisite softness, thickness, and beauty.  It gets these qualities from the fact that there are one million hairs per square inch on a sea otter's hide.  This is what keeps these animals warm in the cold northern Pacific waters, this and a nearly constant need to eat in order to burn caloric energy.  Other marine mammals, seals, sea lions, whales, porpoises, have a thick layer of blubber that insulates them from the cold water, a much less energy demanding strategy and one requiring much less maintenance.  These facts are what led me to my contemplation of evolution and creationism.  I guess now that I think about it, that skull rock also made me contemplate evolution and creationism as well.
  For quite some time now, I have been puzzled by this philosophical argument.  Why do we limit ourselves to one of the two?  It is rare to find an evolutionist who also believes in a higher power while most creationists discount any aspects of evolution.  These dichotomous paths in reason have always confounded me and seem to do more to distract us from the truths of life than to reveal them, it's a way to divide (literally) and limit thought.  In my thinking, the combination of evolution and creationism leads down a path of truth.
Evolution relies on the belief that all living things are results of genetic mutations that benefit an organism and are passed to the following generations and that this has happened  over unimaginable amounts of time.  There are many aspects of this belief that are scientifically provable and make sense to me but it takes out any sense awe of the world for me.  Its cold reliance on chance seems nihilistic and, for me, does not explain the beauty of nature adequately.  The Golden Mean comes to mind as do those flowers that somehow had genetic mutations that led to them looking EXACTLY like the female of the species of insect that pollinates them so the male will visit the flower and get the pollen in EXACTLY the right place to pollinate the flower.  Isn't it more beautiful to think that maybe there was some exquisite hand at work there?
Creation, on the other hand, seems too easy of an explanation, too much like the work of a magician to me.  The POOF! there it is theory is how I think of it.  God created everything exactly how it is today in 6 days.  Even if we interpret "days" as some time period that could be much longer than 24 hours, my thought of God is of a much more complicated, incomprehensible Being with the ability to do things we cannot even think about like maybe creating a system in which random chance, environmental conditions, and scientific laws with some influence by an unseen influencer has resulted in the miracle in which we live.  My thought is that a God would have no problem creating a system in which creatures evolve over time into ever different forms, this, to me, is Godlike.  I see science and the hand of something bigger everywhere in nature, random chance and genetic mutations fail to fully explain the wonder around us to me nor does an old man on a throne in the sky pointing his finger and saying "Be so!"  God is much more beautiful and terrifying than that.

A visitor looking to spend the night in our tent.

The same visitor after Andrea transplanted it onto a safer and more photogenic surface.

A starfish hanging out until the tide comes back in.

The next pictures are of our bird nerd experience of the trip.  We were exploring a small island with extensive sand and gravel bars and eelgrass flats exposed at low tide when we heard a bird sound that was unfamiliar,

Did you notice the battered aluminum skiff in the bottom picture?  You never know what you will find on these beaches.

These are the birds that made the uncommon sound, Black Oystercatchers.  This is the first time that I have seen them in Alaska and we ended up seeing 3 of them total, these two out on the rocks and then one more that flew in and got the other two to fly away.  Fortunately, we found one of them on the island where we could get closer to them for better photos, well, I got some better photos but unfortunately, Andrea's memory card on her camera was full and her extra one was several hundred yards away packed in her kayak.  Photography can be frustrating at times!

How about some random pictures that I don't really know how to fit into the narrative part of this blog?

One interesting feature of these islands is that there is little freshwater.  This is a temperate rainforest and this summer has been a very wet and rainy one but potable water is still scarce here.  The islands are mostly rather small with little topography, the tallest islands are around 500 feet high, and the bedrock is predominantly limestone which could drain water away in some unseen tunnels or caves.  We had planned for this reality bringing enough water with us for the first 3 days and I used a hunting app with satellite imagery to scout possible water sources that could sustain our water supply for the remainder of the trip but the on the ground truth was that we had difficulty in finding good drinking water.  The first places we checked that looked like possible streams turned out to be nothing so we paddled to a place where there were 2 small bodies of water not far from the beach.  These turned out to be shallow and somewhat stagnant but we filled up a water bag and treated it just to have some water and then paddled on to the next possibility which was a small lake on one of the larger islands.  This seemed more promising as I quickly heard the beautiful sound of water running over rocks as I walked up the nearly dry streambed.  It is good to do without things and be in situations that require a person to appreciate the many things that we take for granted like water.  We weren't stranded in a desert wilderness and we weren't near death from dehydration but I was very thankful for that water running over those rocks.  I did not want the rest of trip to be spent paddling from spot to spot hoping for water while I got more and more stressed being concerned for Andrea's well being and her enjoyment of our trip.  The source of the water was a pretty lake created by a huge, old beaver dam nestled between low hills covered in salal beneath the trees.  Giardia?  What?  Beaver fever?  Of course I thought about that and we did treat this water as well to be safe although I drank at least a liter of it untreated as I was beginning to get a headache from inadequate hydration.  I have not filtered my "wild" water for probably 2 decades now and have never gotten sick so I have either been lucky or I have a powerful gut!!

Looks fine!

Our last campsite was our favorite and will be one visited again in the future.  It had a great sloped gravel beach protected from the outside waters, a beautiful forest with level tent spots, some really interesting geology, and........ a freshwater spring just around the corner from where we camped that trickled out of the limestone onto the beach with just enough volume to be able to use a coffee cup to fill all of our water containers in about 5 minutes!  Delicious cold water that needed no filtering or treating of any kind.  We couldn't ask for a more perfect place to spend the last two nights of the trip.

The simplicity of living from a backpack or kayak has always appealed to me and is probably what hooked me a long time ago.  Tents bring me a kind of joy and a well placed tarp is like having an additional room in your temporary home.

The forest was extensively carpeted with False Lily of the Valley and some huge ferns.  It was beautiful.

This was an idyllic spot to camp with the added benefit of being one of the wider and deeper passages allowing for whales to pass by us several times a day not far from shore.  Probably half a dozen whales went by us as we sat on the beach and on a couple of occasions I quickly launched my kayak and sprinted after them.

You might be able to hear my heavy breathing in the video as a whale travelling at a leisurely whale pace still swims at about 7 knots requiring the whale obsessed paddler to really put some power into his strokes.
After one of my mostly fruitless chases, I stopped to explore a very small island that was really nothing more than a large rock high enough above the water to have been populated by a surprising number of plant species. The falling tide exposed much of this rock and revealed numerous tide pools in the jagged limestone.  It was hard to photograph these pools in a way that really gives them credit but they were very interesting and beautiful.

Such a cool discovery!  This nondescript unnamed rock was one of the highlights of this trip for me and I intend to explore it again in the future.  It was a fairly treacherous rock to wander around on as the exposed and weathered limestone presented a walking surface much like walking on the edge of a serrated knife blade that was also covered with barnacles in some places.  It was like walking on razor blades on top of a serrated knife blade while wearing sandals.  I made it off the rock unscathed though thanks to Vibram soles and caution.

I found these interesting fish skulls in a crevasse above that tide pool.  I have no idea what kind of fish they are but it was an interesting find.

The view from under the tarp.

Just a few photos of these rugged, jagged, beautiful limestone shores.

Some of the interesting geology found on the beach.

Maidenhair ferns

A petroglyph we found.  It's difficult to figure out what this depicts and I have no idea how old it is.  It may be a mystery.

What an absolutely fantastic trip!!  And to finish off this post, how about a Heart in Nature to say goodbye.